Seth Rogen made an onstage jab at President Trump during the science-honoring Breakthrough Prizes on April 5, but viewers who did not watch the event’s livestream won’t be able to hear it. The organization’s “full” upload of the ceremony, and other official clips of Rogen’s appearance alongside Edward Norton, have been edited to exclude a quip about attendees at the tech-industry-originated event who have supported the current presidential administration.
“It’s amazing that others in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science,” Rogen reportedly said in the since-cut remark. “It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr., very fast.”
The Breakthrough Prizes confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter (a sponsor for the event) that Rogen’s joke was one of “several edits” to the show, arguing it was “made in order to meet the originally planned run time.” This seems unlikely, as the ceremony would not have had to conform to any broadcasting scheduling requirements, as it was not aired on television networks. (As is, the ceremony runs nearly 100 minutes on the Breakthrough Prizes’ YouTube channel.) Additionally, the standalone clip of Rogen and Norton’s onstage presentation seems unlikely to have had an “originally planned” run time, and wouldn’t have necessitated such edits.
Recognizing significant scientific advances each year, the Breakthrough Prizes began in 2013, with Google founder Sergey Brin and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg among the founders, along with Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki and Yuri and Julia Milner. Zuckerberg and Brin both visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the 2024 election to meet with the then-president-elect. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO behind Trump’s newly founded, ambiguously empowered Department of Government Efficiency, attended last year’s Breakthrough ceremony.
Rogen and Norton were presenting a special Breakthrough Prize to Gerardus’t Hooft, a Dutch theoretic physicist and Nobel-winner who has spent his career in quantum field theory.
